Why?
This is what I don’t understand. People can’t seem to grasp that there’s probably only 500,000 real Classic players, but we’re going to see 2-3 million at launch who will never leave the starter zones.
Sharding as it was proposed, is to allow those starters to bulge while the tourists visit, then revert to normal caps right after the bulge stops.
Except that your client will time out, and you get removed from the queue.
The starting zone is 2-4 hours of gameplay at best. While I expect a great many of people to quit, I don’t see most doing it in the first few hours of play. What happens when those 15k players funnel down to a 3k server? Do they get kicked and placed in queue? What happens on the servers that don’t see as much decline and stay well over the 3k mark? What will be done to the servers that lose more than expected and drop well below the 3k mark? Not all servers will decline evenly. Even during retail vanilla you had high and low pop servers.
Personally I don’t buy any of these numbers. Classic will be niche. FF11 is still going but has a very small playerbase (would love if they launched a progressive server of that). EQ and Lineage also just relaunched progressive servers. There have been some other new MMOs trying to recapture the oldschool MMO feeling. The point is, Blizzard is late to the game, this has been done. And none of these games have massive followings, it is a small dedicated group of players that love those games. To think Classic will be the exception and explode back to the multi-million sub levels is a stretch. MMOs in general have been in decline for a while. There are less people today playing any MMO than was playing WoW alone at it’s peak.
I expect the number of people that return for Classic will only number in the hundreds of thousands at best. Retail players on the other hand play a game with very little content and are being given free access to our game. These players will dwarf us, and be the primary source of population stability problems we face.
Honestly, sharding or no sharding, 15k server caps or vanilla caps, none of this really matters. The moment they took the game away from the vanilla fanbase and made it additional content for retail it was doomed. There is no question as to whether or not Classic launch will be a dumpster fire, that is going to happen. The best we can hope for is that Blizzard is able to come up with ideas to save it post launch.
Durotar? When crowded? That’s at least 16 hours of gameplay.
Yes.
Agreed, and then the same mechanisms can kick in to redistribute. Both “I hate queues” and character transfers will move people. If you say its only 2-4 hours, that’s not a big hurdle to recomplete.
Many people said the same thing in 2004. There’s a reason why WoW is the archetype for when people say MMO now.
Take the Everquest peak of 500k, vs the 12 million in WOW. Now imagine Everquest is down to 50k people. That’s still 1.2 million active WoW players, by the same scale.
… which is better than many MMO’s get on their first run through.
Ref: Title.
This is where I disagree. The 2-3 million might be tourist, but they aren’t conventional tourists. Every MMO has players that come and try it out, and then leave, Clasic will be no exception. What other MMOs don’t have is a whole other game with very little content and 2-3 million players that have free access to the new MMO.
I think 500k is a bit high, I figure 100-200k vanilla fans that will actually play it. There will also be those that played back in 2004 that want to try it out and then leave, but probably not more than 100k of these tourists.
Then there is the retail tourists. They get this game free, and are currently playing a game that offers very little in the form of content. Most of them probably aren’t going to play for a few hours and then never return. Most will probably keep coming back because it’s free, and they have nothing else to do in BFA.
If you think there’s 2-3 million tourists and only 100-200k classic players… this is more ammunition for sharding. That’s a bigger proportion of people who won’t make it out of Durotar because its “too hard” or “too slow”.
But I’m not talking about normal tourists, I’m talking about retail tourists. A normal tourists buys a game, plays it until the sub runs out, and then never plays again.
Retail tourists already have a sub for retail. They will eventually make it through Durotar. Of course they come form an anti social single player game so I don;t expect them to contribute a great deal to Classic other than taking up spots.
Less than 5 hours according to Joanna, and that’s going all the way to lv13. Many people end up leaving earlier. Might have been off on the 2-4 hour bit, ~4 hrs is a bit more accurate.
Doing a speed run in an empty zone in 2006 with prepared gear and consumables.
Please don’t equate Joana’s speed runs with the launch chaos.
We’ll see. They may decide the server is too full and reroll, or not worth playing because there’s always queues.
Fair question. Two reasons.
First being that they can do the same just by running wide on servers then merging later ( something they will eventually have to do as servers get to unreasonably low populations later anyway). That to many including myself is a far more acceptable alternative than either not seeing your friend or having the opportunity to see that guy you you grouped with 15 levels ago because he happens to be on a different shard despite standing right next to you.
The second is a little more cynical. Many don’t trust blizzard to not just turn it on whenever server load starts getting heavy during the weekends or the aforementioned AQ war events. For many by not striking it down now and allowing it to be used it makes it’s use latter seem more acceptable and any use beyond the first week at most is absolutely unacceptable.
Remove the timeout feature from the queue screen? It doesn’t really serve any purpose in retail wow anymore so not like it’s removal would effect retail in anyway. Alternatively Use a keyboard macro on repeat, drinking duck, cat toy attacked to the mouse, etc to keep the client thinking your still there?
a) If you grouped with someone 15 levels ago, then you are well past the sharded zone and won’t have this issue.
b) Server Merging was scrapped for CRZ in Retail. They only merged like 4 servers before they realised it was destructive and went to CRZ so people could continue to feel like they had their own servers. We don’t want, and won’t get CRZ so if they can avoid merges for as long as possible, the better the game.
Nothing the Classic Devs have said to us makes us think anything but that they will turn it off never to see it again. They won’t need it past the launch date because as everyone here agrees, the residual base will be low. And they already said that AQ is one of those things they know they can’t shard. We can easily make it clear we’d prefer server crashes to sharding AQ Gongs.
They could, but that doesn’t solve the queue complaint.
The problem here is that they need Classic to be well received both by the players AND by the general public and the media. The only people obsessed with no sharding are a tiny percentage of the diehard fans. They know those fans will get over it once they hit level 10 in 4 or 16 or whatever hours of play.
If the launch has massive queues, crashes a lot because of overpopulation and is generally seen as a “rocky” launch in normal criteria, it will severely damage the long term existence of Classic. Blizzard can’t afford bad press this year, and sharding will be far more effective at providing a smooth launch than “4 day queue? Suck it up people.” That sort of response has been panned constantly in the media with the “Don’t like it, don’t buy it” responses from EA, Activision and Bioware. Blizzard needs to show that they can do things right because the launch and infrastructure is the modern system, so if it can’t hold a candle to the original game, no-one is going to take them seriously.
Looks like you never played literally any WoW expansion at launch
Vanilla’s launch was nothing like any WoW expansion. Massive frontloading is not authentic.
Vanilla’s launch also has 6 starting areas. TBC had 1, Wrath had 2, and who cares after that. The point being Vanilla is the game that is least requiring of sharding. Players will naturally be split more than any other launch in the game.
Vanilla also only had 89 servers, not 430. There were nearly 6x the servers just in North America, by the time Wrath came out with 2 zones.
Vanilla launched with…I don’t know 400k people? Wrath had 10 million.
I can do this all day. ![:yum:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/yum.png?v=6" ":yum:")
By the way, not really fair adding servers in areas that didn’t even have WoW at Vanilla’s launch.
430 was just North America (plus Oceanic and Sth America who could roll on NA realms).
No idea on EU’s counts.
But the point being anyone trying to claim “Authentic” for launch requires sharding to avoid an “unauthentic” massive queues and overcrowded zones.
That’s fine. I wasn’t debating Classic. I was stating that objectively speaking Vanilla’s world design dictates the least need to shard. But that does extend to Classic. But obviously conditions for Classic’s release in 2019 don’t match those of Vanilla’s in 2004. I’m not denying that.
I think I’ve made it clear at this point I can personally probably tolerate sharding of the 1-10 areas for a limited time (1-2 weeks max). I understand Ion’s rationale for doing that. But I disagree on this prognosis for a mass departure of players. Which means the need for sharding isn’t going anywhere. And I’ve covered Blizzard’s options at that point already. And what I expect them to do: extend sharding.
I think this is one of those cases where they can learn something from pservers. Realms are going to decline, that is a part of a 15 year old game with no further development going on. On most pservers they start to decline after AQ is released. Contrary to popular belief, AQ is not faceroll, and many guilds wont progress through it. This is also the point where raiding guilds start to massively outgear the more casual players, making it less enjoyable for them to play.
They will have no choice but to eventually merge servers. Might as well just use it instead of sharding and the hope that 15k servers will trim down to 3k servers in a few days.
Except that Pservers never merged. And quite a few didn’t decline from AQ, they declined because a fresh server came out and everyone moved for the initial races again.
I’m hoping this isn’t for at least 3 or 4 years. At which point we’ll all be willing to accept it and hopefully work up a new community between the servers.
I think server mergers are better than CRZ. It’s the combining of communities, whereas CRZ is the illusion of a community.